It’s hard to picture the end-game of renewables’ full takeover of the energy sector—but it will happen. Wind and solar both have their shortcomings, but with the astonishing collapse of battery storage costs over the past decade, intermittency is no longer an issue. Hydro works well in many places, but even where it’s dry, a new generation of geothermal power is coming to provide baseload power and district heating from the Gobi Desert to Antarctica. By the time nuclear fusion arrives, we won’t need it; fusion is fundamentally centralized anyway, and renewables are pushing us to decentralize our grids—to decouple them from big, centralized baseload sources. Fusion will be an awkward partner in this mix.

It’s even harder to imagine what the world will look like when precision fermentation comes into its own. We already have Solein, and precision-fermentation replacements for milk and cheese. Solein in particular, with its promise of providing food anywhere that electricity is available (which is now everywhere, see the above paragraph) points towards a future where a minimum of nutrition can be guaranteed in almost any nation on Earth.

Combine just these two trends—cheap power anywhere, and basic nutrition anywhere—and what does this revolutionary future look like?

The Metabolic Floor

The world already produces enough food for everyone, and climate change is not going to change this. (If even the smallest African village has its own solar-powered Solein plant, drought and ecosystem collapse impacts will be strongly reduced; projections of famine based on climate change assume that our food system will not evolve, but it will and it is.) Right now, true production‑side scarcity still occurs due to droughts, wildfires, and the collapse of fisheries, but it is usually localized (e.g., a failed harvest in a remote valley) and quickly mitigated by international trade—provided that trade routes remain open and purchasing power exists. It’s when those conditions break down that the scarcity becomes effective rather than physical. The current famines in the Middle East and Sudan are instances of the weaponization of food access—not actual scarcity.

Taking our notional African village as an example, we can imagine a near-future system of fully distributed energy and basic nutrition. Imagine how hard it would be to track down and destroy every solar panel and satellite dish in a region thousands of kilometers in extent, and then imagine that each of those panels is powering a small family- or neighbourhood-sized precision fermentation vat. It will be possible, but difficult, to generate famine except when one has complete control over a geographic area, and many regions are simply too large to be policed in this way.

Considering that solar panels and LED lights can last for decades, then as long as communities have access to the additional mix of minerals that go into the feedstock for Solein or comparable photosynthesizing microbes (these additives being the only major source of potential scarcity now) then a community can be physically isolated for years but remain alive, connected to the web and with all the lights on.

What I’m describing here is a form of New Medievalism. Even a couple of years ago I would not have considered it a likely outcome in the near future; but times have changed, and quickly. It has its upsides and downsides, but in either case this is a very different picture of the world our children will have to live in.

Imagine renewables everywhere and inland bioreactors feeding millions, the provision of those two services being a basic subsistence layer of civilization that is automated, boring, and reliable. They are the basis for meeting the fundamental needs of your citizens. Together they form what I’m calling a “metabolic floor”—a stable, low-growth infrastructure that keeps societies lit, fed, hydrated, and warm. Unlike traditional subsistence economies, this floor is industrial, modular, and scalable.

Once a nation crosses the threshold into metabolic self-sufficiency, its vulnerability to global shocks collapses, and its political imagination broadens. But different countries cross this threshold in radically different ways.

Post-Scarcity Does Not Mean Post-Politics

The European Union could become the first major example of what metabolic integration looks like. Under the unexpected pressure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, European states have accelerated their transition to energy independence. Offshore wind grids, cross-border HVDC links, and a coordinated climate policy create a continental metabolic commons. Solein is a Finnish invention, ready to provide the protein component of the metabolic floor if needed. The more self-sufficient the infrastructure becomes, the more viable integration will feel. In this case, metabolic security can encourage political cohesion rather than fragmentation.

Russia represents a very different pathway. Instead of using energy independence to integrate, it’s been doubling down on autarky, nationalism, and territorial aggression. Hydro, nuclear, and domestic gas have given Moscow its own version of a metabolic floor, but one that is used as insulation rather than as a platform for cooperation. The parallel wars in Ukraine and other regions demonstrate that metabolic independence doesn’t pacify states. It frees them to pursue the particular politics they already favored. Europe integrates; Russia isolates and expands.

Uruguay offers a third path—one that is neither imperial nor integrationist. The country is closing rapidly on 100% renewable energy use. It’s agriculturally independent as well. Uruguay might become the prototype of a small, steady-state, quietly prosperous, locally anchored society. Ironically, it (like Canada and Norway) is aggressively pursuing the export of fossil fuels as a cash crop. We can’t expect this to last, as the Carbon Bubble will pop soon and fossil fuels will cease to be a viable export market, likely within twenty years. For Uruguay the next decade gives it an opportunity to cash in on oil while building a sovereign wealth fund (similar to the UAE’s $2 trillion one) that it can use to invest and attract business and commodities it needs.

So metabolic independence can support small democracies and middle powers, and opens the door to prosperity that need not be growth-oriented.

No Single Narrative

Metabolic independence, if it occurs, doesn’t lead to a uniform zero-growth world. Once every region can feed and power itself, the world stops being a single economic game and becomes a mosaic of metabolic regimes—some cooperative, some predatory, some isolationist, some experimental. When we talk about this possible regime, we’re no longer in the business of predicting a future, we are mapping a branching space of possible futures that’s already emerging in front of us.

In other words, we’re not facing Utopia or Dystopia, but both, overlaid, combined and recombined, rebranded and executed differently, in bewildering ways, across a future world both fragmented and tightly integrated by information, trade, and a planetary commons of ecological limits and tipping-points.

This brand of New Medievalism might serve as an amplifier of cultural, historical, and political differences, rather than the stabilizer that Globalism provided. Metabolic independence won’t eliminate geopolitical competition—it will redirect it toward minerals, knowledge, ecological sinks, and symbolic power. Some regions may slip below the metabolic floor due to climate damage or political mismanagement, creating islands of instability in an otherwise self-sufficient world. The result is not global collapse but uneven resilience—an archipelago world where safe and unsafe zones coexist, and where the moral burden of abundance becomes harder to ignore.

We may be entering an era when where the fundamentals of life are locally secured while the higher-order complexities of culture, governance, and identity diversify beyond anything the twentieth century predicted. This is the invitation hidden in the energy transition—a chance to embrace regional plurality without giving up global responsibility.

We’re already charting a clear path in Canada—though the new budget of the Carney government is a curious mix of visionary and arch-conservative, it does point the way towards a more self-sufficient future for my country.

Your task is to imagine what your region’s metabolic future could look like. How might your city, state, or nation contribute to a world defined not by scarcity but by a metabolic floor that supports and encourages diversity and independence?

—K

A Slack friend polled the group for thoughts on teaching art direction, and I thought I’d share with you all what I shared with her. Art direction something I touch on in my UX/IXD classes, and I realized it’s very similar to how I teach UX patterns. To me, there are 3 steps.

1. Develop your vocabulary

First you need to know what’s already out there; it’s all part of our baseline for usability or aesthetics. I bucket the ocean like college level classes:

101: general standards

• UX Patterns 101 would be the default interface elements like buttons, links, checkboxes, radio buttons, lists, tables, date pickers, color pickers. Also major templates You could learn these by looking at developer documentation, like the W3 docs on HTML elements, or old classics like Designing Interfaces or the polar bear book (Information Architecture).

• Art Direction 101 might be your most popular art movements, artists, photographers, and directors. You could fluently say “in the style of Dadaism, Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, or Wes Anderson.” There are lots of free art history courses online to explore.

201: professional best practices

• UX Patterns 201 might be common design system components like accordions, panels, chips, facepiles, or tunnels. You could learn these by exploring Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines or Google’s Material Design guidelines, or the component libraries for popular JavaScript frameworks (React, Angular, etc.)

• Art Direction 201 might expand your vocabulary of movements, artists, or brands: Russian Constructivism, Corporate Memphis, Web 2.0, Vaporware, and more. I love this giant List of Aesthetics on Fandom.

301: cultural specifics

• UX Patterns 301 could get into cultural and subcultural variations — art world vs gaming vs e-commerce vs editorial expectations. You can see lots of different corporate components in Figma’s Design Systems site or Storybook’s component library showcase, and also find dedicated directories like the Game UI database or Data Viz Project.

• Art Direction 301 might be more niche aesthetics and trends. ’s Casual Archivist newsletter pulls up great gems and trends from history, and she’s shared her whole list of public archives too.

401: emerging trends

• UX Patterns 401 might include novel interfaces (like Soot’s spiral image browser or Hume’s expressive voice AI) or emerging patterns from new technologies or companies (e.g. The Shape of AI or Awwwards). To learn these, nerd out. Dedicate the time to explore and absorb. I like godly.website and 60fps.design and there’s also a million other resources in my Notion Toolkit.

• Art Direction 401 might draw from the most contemporary trends and styles. Cosmos is a beautiful new exploration tool, and Are.na is probably the most popular way to keep up. Again start with Elizabeth Goodspeed and explore from there. also writes a newsletter entirely about art direction.

Can you tell I’m a strategist who loves nothing more than creating another framework? lol

My book has a full spread of common UX patterns to help people with their development here. It’s a vocabulary quiz and a visual reference, grouped into practical clusters. How many have you used?

2. Sharpen your eye

Next, you have to be able to see the small differences between things. What’s the difference between portraits by Annie Leibowitz and Richard Avedon? Between rounded corners of 5px vs 8px? Between #F5F5F5 and #F3F3F3?

I gave my current grad students an optional packet of Mystery Grid puzzles (carefully curated from Teachers Pay Teachers worksheets) as a fun way to sharpen their eyes. I did tons of these drawing exercises as a kid (plus other how-to-draw books from the school book fair), and they made my hand-eye relationship sharp enough to skip Drawing II in art school. I put one of them in my book too.

Another good exercise is to try and recreate an interface or artwork you love. You’ll really notice all the details once you get into the canvas and work with them.

When you see all the tiny choices, and how they affect the overall gestalt, you start to become a real craftsperson.

3. Define your personal point of view

Once you’re able to see all those patterns and details, you’re able to take a position on them. Defining your personal design principles will help you cut a steady path through the world of inspirations and options (rather than drifting from possibility to possibility).

For me, teaching was the activity that forced me to draw my line in the sand. I had to tell students what was good, and what was not so good, and why.

For other people, a public channel like a blog or social media presence becomes an arena for them to present, defend, and refine their preferences.

MFA programs also focus on supporting this important accomplishment (which sometimes disappoints the students who prioritize technical skills, as if the programs are very expensive boot camps). teaches a whole class on Point of View in SVA’s Products of Design program (where I currently teach too).

Find some way to express your principles. (Or just quote Dieter Rams like everyone else.)

Keep learning

Boss lady Martha Stewart says that one of her mottos is “learn something new every day.” What’s missing from the lists above? I’d love to hear any resources or frameworks that helped you learn art direction or UX. What’s your POV?

The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day. The V&A does an unboxing of a half dozen tarot card decks from the last 500 years.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Edward O. Wilson in 2009: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

Long before the first shots were fired in the Civil War, beginning early in the 19th century, Americans had been fighting a protracted war of words over slavery.

On one side, Southern planters and slavery apologists portrayed the practice of human bondage as sanctioned by God and beneficial even to enslaved people.

On the other side, opponents of slavery painted a picture of violence, injustice and the hypocrisy of professed Christians defending the sin of slavery.

But to the abolitionists, it became crucial to transcend mere rhetoric. They wanted to show Americans uncomfortable truths about the practice of slavery – a strategy that is happening again as activists and citizens fight modern-day attempts at historical whitewashing.

As a media scholar who has studied the history of abolitionist journalism, I hear echoes of that two-century-old narrative battle in President Donald Trump’s effort to purge public memorials and markers honoring the suffering and heroism of the enslaved as well as those who championed their freedom.

Celebration vs. reality

Among the materials reportedly flagged for removal from history museums, national parks, and other government facilities is a disturbing but powerful photograph known as “The Scourged Back.”

The 1863 image depicts a formerly enslaved man, his back horrifically scarred by whipping. It’s certainly hard to look at, yet to look away or try to forget it means to ignore what it has to say about the complicated and often brutal history of the nation.

In Trump’s view, these memorials are “revisionist” and “driven by ideology rather than truth.” In an executive order named Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, Trump said public materials should “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

Essentially, the president appears to want a history that celebrates American achievement rather than being forced to look at “The Scourged Back” and other historical realities that document aspects of the American story that don’t warrant celebration.

Combating ignorance of slavery’s horrors

Thinking back to the decades leading up to the Civil War, facts were the weapon abolitionists wielded in their fight against the distortions of pro-slavery forces. It was an uphill battle in the face of indifference by many in the North. After a visit to Massachusetts in 1830, abolitionist writer William Lloyd Garrison blamed such attitudes on “exceeding ignorance of the horrors of slavery.”

It is not surprising that in the early 19th century many Americans would have had limited knowledge of slavery. Travel was arduous, time-consuming and expensive, and most Northerners had little firsthand exposure to slave societies. Abolitionists argued that those who did visit the South were often shielded from the harsher realities of slavery. This extended to the media ecosystem, which lacked any real national news organizations.

Moreover, Southern plantation owners carried out a robust propaganda effort to extol the beneficence of their economic system. In letters, pamphlets and books, they argued that slavery was beneficial to all and that the enslaved were happy and well-treated. They also attacked their opponents as evil and dishonest.

As abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote in 1838: “The apologists of Southern slavery are accustomed to brand every picture of slavery and its fruits as exaggeration or calumny.”

Don’t look away

Thus, the challenge for abolitionists was to show slavery as it really was – and to compel people to look. An emphasis on hard evidence took firm hold in the wave of abolitionism in the 1830s.

Activists didn’t yet have photography, so they relied on accounts from eyewitnesses and formerly enslaved people, official reports and even some plantation owners’ own words in Southern newspaper advertisements seeking the return of runaways.

“Until the pictures of the slave’s sufferings were drawn up and held up to public gaze, no Northerner had any idea of the cruelty of the system,” abolitionist Angelina Grimké wrote in her famous “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South” in 1836.

“It never entered their minds that such abominations could exist in Christian, Republican America; they never suspected that many of the gentlemen and ladies who came from the South to spend the summer months in travelling among them, were petty tyrants at home,” Grimké wrote.

In pamphlets and newspapers, Grimké and others laid down a documentary record of the abuses of slavery, naming names and emphasizing legal evidence of their claims. In my research, I have argued that while abolitionists didn’t invent the journalistic exposé, they did develop the first fully articulated methodology for confronting abuses of power through carefully documented facts – laying the groundwork for later generations of investigative reporters and fact-checkers.

Most critically, what they did is point a finger at injustice and demand that America not look away. In its first issue, in 1835, the newspaper Human Rights emphasized “the importance of first settling what slavery really is.” Inside, it included a series of advertisements documenting slave sales and rewards for runaways reprinted from Southern newspapers.

The headline: “ ”

Tried and acquitted

One of the most remarkable efforts in this abolitionist campaign was a 233-page pamphlet called “American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.” Published in 1839 by Theodore Dwight Weld along with his wife, Angelina Grimké, and her sister, it was an exhaustively documented exposé of floggings, torture, killings, overwork and undernourishment.

One example involved a wealthy tobacconist who whipped a 15-year-old girl to death: “While he was whipping her, his wife heated a smoothing iron, put it on her body in various places, and burned her severely. The verdict of the coroner’s inquest was, ‘Died of excessive whipping.’ He was tried in Richmond and acquitted.”

It is difficult reading, to be sure, and certainly the kind of material that might foster “a national sense of shame,” as Trump’s executive order claims. But getting rid of the evils of slavery meant first acknowledging them. And the second part – critical to avoiding the mistakes of the past – is remembering them.

‘Consciences shocked’

So how effective was this abolitionist campaign to lay bare the terrible facts about slavery?

At least some readers of “” had their consciences shocked. : “We thought we knew something of the horrid character of slavery before, but upon looking over the pages of this book, we find that we had no adequate idea of the number and enormity of the cruelties which are constantly being perpetrated under this system of all abominations.”

And one famous reader was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who drew on the book as inspiration for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published more than a decade later.

The 1830s reflected the height of the abolitionist movement in books, pamphlets and newspapers. While the activism continued in the 1840s and 1850s, ultimately it took secession and civil war to finally end slavery. But, of course, it didn’t take long for the country to fall into a prolonged period of formal and informal segregation in both the North and the South, many vestiges of which remain.

That reality of a history that doesn’t proceed along a straight path to justice underscores the importance of preserving, remembering and teaching difficult parts of the past such as “The Scourged Back.”

On the title page of “American Slavery As It Is,” Weld and the Grimkés printed a quote from the biblical book of Ezekiel: “Behold the wicked abominations that they do.” It was a command to the nation to look without flinching at what it was, and it is as pertinent today as it was then.

--30--

Written by Gerry Lanosga, Associate Professor of Journalism, Indiana University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The address was in West Erlsley – they often were – in a maze of rundown tenements and concrete walkways that stank of piss and the charred extinction of small conjuring fires.  Pathetic remnants of bone and fur and feathers in sheltered corners, where the meagre sacrifices had been made.  Huldu runes scrawled across the stone in charcoal or daubed in blood.  As far as Duncan could tell, most of it was gibberish.  Certainly, there was nothing you’d call a functional spell anywhere on these walls.  Here and there, he even spotted the odd piece of mathematical notation in the mix, though his math was not good enough to work out if it had any more coherence than the Huldu symbols it co-existed among.

None of which surprised him in the least.  

In the trenches, he’d seen men cling to all and any systems of faith they could muster; some even distilling their own homegrown superstition, ritual, prayer, whatever – anything at all to give the illusion of control over the vast impersonal forces that brought them death on a daily basis.  One soldier under his command in early 1915,  private Greaves, had carried with him a set of intricately whittled wooden figures.  He would take them out whenever he had leisure, set them up in some configuration that evidently had meaning to him – though the configuration often changed – and would then crouch and whisper softly to them under his breath, like a mother soothing small children to sleep.

Greaves had taken some sour ribbing for this early on, but Duncan had ordered it staunched, and after that the other men left him alone.  Later, when Greaves had proved remarkably long lived, given the action they’d all seen, a couple of the other soldiers from the company even started to gather round and join in with the ritual.  They’d stand and watch diffidently while Greaves set out the whittled figures, wait until he gestured them closer, and then crouch with him, and begin.  Their pooled murmuring would softly rise and fall in the lamp-glow and gloom of whatever bivouac they’d lucked into.  It managed to be both eerie and strangely comforting at one and the same time.

Now that he thought back, Duncan realised that there might have been something of Huldu slenderness and poise in those carved wooden figures.  And he wondered belatedly what home Greaves had come from, what part of Britain, where such things might already have had currency, even back then.  It wasn’t something he’d ever find out now – Greaves died in the mud at Ypres, along with almost everyone else under Duncan’s command at the time.  The way he heard it later, a tank whose driver was addled on carbon monoxide fumes lost control nosing around a machine gun nest revetment.  The tank veered, clipped and toppled three men, Greaves among them, then crushed them into the ground as it churned desperately in reverse.  Duncan supposed the slender, whittled wooden figures met a similar fate.

Wake up, Duncan.

Stir of other figures now, blunt and hunched against the cold as they spilled across the concrete walkway ahead; clink as a boot caught an empty bottle and sent it skittering.  The sound yanked him back to present concerns.  He slowed a little, assessed the spread.  It didn’t look like much – local toughs, three of them, pinched pale faces under rain damp hoods, bulky workman’s jackets that made them look bigger than they were. Booted feet, stumbling a little with the booze or maybe just with sitting too long in the cold.  Long necked brown beer bottles, too loosely held to be weapons.  WAR DEBT MALAISE, blared the headlines, ECONOMY STALLED, NO SOLUTION IN SIGHT FOR FOREST CRISIS.  Fear, panic, exhaustion, unemployment spiralling steadily upward, and well, here’s your result.

Duncan eased to a halt.

“Gentlemen,” he said warily.

“Fucking Otherkin,” one of them spat, uncertainly.

Duncan couldn’t really blame him.  It was in the cut and weave of the hooded jacket he wore, the boots with their intricate tooled leather.  For clients, he dressed to broadcast his trade, to sell how well he belonged in the Forest, and that look wasn’t a million miles from all the cute and cheap and practised signifiers the dress-up brigade pulled to ape the Huldu they’d mostly only ever met in the pages of novels and maybe the sepia-tone projector slides of a Russell Maynard Dalton lecture.  To the young toughs’ boozed up eyes, Duncan looked the part.  Wannabe fae fuck pretender at large.  Dilettante.  An easy mark.  

If they’d seen Duncan’s eyes and expression and stance more clearly, they would have understood their mistake.

But it was a gloomy autumn afternoon in West Erlsley, glowering black rain clouds hung low and soaking up what little decent light was left in the sky.  And these angry, idle young men were neither close enough nor sober enough to pick up on the details of the mess they were about to make.

“I’m looking for Umber Cottages,” he pre-empted them.  “This the right way?”

It stalled whatever they’d had in mind.  They looked at each other, unsure.  The biggest of the three swigged exaggeratedly at his beer.  He lowered the bottle, wiped his mouth.  Belched loudly.  Gestured broadly.

“It’s this way, yeah.  But, uh….” swaggering closer, visibly gathering courage.  “You gotta pay a toll, like.”

Duncan looked at him.  “No, I don’t.”

The moment stretched, twanged and snapped.  The tough looked away.

“You’ll want to let me pass,” Duncan suggested.

Confused looks between the other two.  They hadn’t seen what the first man had, but they weren’t too drunk to sense the shift.  The lead tough stood reluctantly aside.  Duncan moved past them with every appearance of casual amiability.  He grinned at them, nodded.  Later, sobering up, they would try to piece it together and fail, and bicker and blame each other.  But Duncan’s eyes would linger in all their memories, and each would privately understand that this was not a scuffle they could have won.

Meanwhile, Duncan made his way along the concrete walkway, undecided if he was happy to have avoided the fight or not.  As ever, his rage simmered close to the surface. But something, some remnant of shame and regret for the mess with Ellie Furlough last Spring, was enough to hold it down.

Just enough.

He  took a couple of turns in the concrete warren, following the directions he’d been given, and shortly after that, he stumbled on Umber Cottages.  It was one of the worst misnomers he’d ever seen – a short, ugly terraced row of two storey worker housing in cheaply finished grey  stone.  Raw concrete steps led up to wooden front doors with peeling black paint.  Pokey little windows sat high up, like eyes peering myopically into a future printed too fine to read.  The facades were modern – probably put up in the early days of Re-clearance, when it was still thought the advance of the Forest could be stopped, and thousands were drafted in for the work – but already the stonework looked stained and tired.  

Duncan found number sixteen and knocked.  A wan-looking woman of about fifty opened for him, looked him up and down with narrow suspicion.

“We don’t want none o’ that,” she snapped, in accents from somewhere a long way south of Erlsley.  “She’s to be left alone.  G’ahn, or I’ll call the bottles on yer.”

“Duncan Silver,” he explained.  “For Irene Rush.  I’m expected.”

From within the dimly lit spaces behind the door, something shrieked like a howitzer shell descending.  

The noise froze the woman where she stood.  Duncan nodded.

“Perhaps you’d better let me in.”

She stood aside, wordless.  Duncan ducked his head and stepped through into the hall space.  The shriek came again, intensified.  He tracked it to a side room, door solidly closed.  He moved past into the living room.  No gas in these premises, certainly no electric – what light there was came from hurricane lamps stood on the sideboard and main table, wicks cranked up, and a struggling fire in the grate.  Shadows capered on the walls.

“Are you him?”

She sat coiled and wrapped in a shawl and nightgown in an armchair at the sole window in the room, staring out at what must have been the backyards of the row.  Legs drawn up under her, one naked foot trailing from the under the hem of the gown.  Hard to tell in the dim light, but she seemed young.  Pale skin. Long dark hair, left down and uncombed, he reckoned, for quite a while.  There was a livid mark on one cheek where someone had struck her hard enough to break the skin.  Glimmer of recent tear tracks she’d left unwiped.

“Aye, I’m Silver.”  He said it as gently as he could.  “Like the pirate.”

“Like the pirate,”  she repeated mechanically.  

Speaking seemed to stir something in her.  She turned in her chair to look at him fully, and it dawned on him abruptly that she was an attractive woman.  The pale face framed in all that hair reminded him of someone – one of the actresses he’d had postcards of as a boy, perhaps.  Ethel Warwick, tits out for Whistler, or maybe that American one he’d liked, Marie Doro.  Fey, young, silk-draped things, all big beckoning eyes, leaves and flowers strewn through their hair.

“They say you’ll go to the Forest, Mr Silver?” Her voice was a dredged whisper, a husk.  “They say you’re not afraid?”

“A lot of men will go to the Forest, Mrs Rush.  Especially for the money you promise.  Especially in these times.”

She nodded, moved again in the chair.  Both feet touched down on the floor, revealed long, shapely calves above.  He saw that the gown was pricey – sheer silk, out of place in the stark tenement surroundings.  Irene Rush had fallen on hard times, and maybe not that long ago.  

She sniffed and cleared her throat, wiped the back of her hand over each cheek in turn to clear the tracks of her tears.

“Yes, I – I suppose you have seen service?  You have passed through the fire?”

He tried not to grimace at the phrase.  It was overly popular that year, much delivered from pulpits and lecterns and the benches of Parliament – passed through the flames; baptism of fire; passage through the flaming rites of the War to end all wars.  So forth.

“I was in France, yes.  And Flanders, for a while.”

“Then you are not afraid.”

“Mrs Rush, a man who goes to the Forest and is not afraid is a man who will not be coming out again.  Try not to believe too much of what you read in the pulps.”

The hard-faced older woman came and stood in the room with her back to the window.  Arms folded, watchful, touching distance to her ward.  He saw in her face that she didn’t trust him any more now than she had when they had their misunderstanding at the door.  He wondered how many like him they’d already seen, how much of their obviously dwindling funds they’d seen wasted with no result, how many shysters calling and slipping away with an easy grin.  Demonologists, Theosophicals, Sword-and-Orbsters, all the sub-Blavatsky types and splinters, Woodsmen-who-weren’t, fly-by-night witch and warlock fakes, Otherkin flimflam artists, the whole sad circus erupting into their lives one tawdry act after another….   

Once again, through the wall from the room next door, the awful, downward hurtling shriek.  The older woman’s eyes moistened.  He saw how Mrs Rush flinched, how her hand rose trembling towards the livid mark on her cheek.  Her gaze fell away into whatever place had stolen the strength from her voice.

“It won’t stop,” she husked, to him or to herself, it wasn’t clear.  “It just……won’t stop.”

He nodded.  “In all likelihood, it has the Sight.  It will know I’m here.”

She looked at him again, then, as if for the first time.  As if the whole thing had only now become real in her mind.  It was a common enough moment amongst afflicted parents.  Duncan took the snuff box from his pocket, crouched beside her to make himself less alarming.

“Look – Mrs Rush, let me be honest.  At this moment, I cannot be sure that your child has been removed to the Forest, or that what’s in the next room is a changeling.  But it certainly sounds that way.  And there is an easy test.  Here.”  He held out the snuff box.  “Open this.”

She took the box, struggled a moment with the ornate catch, then lifted the lid and peered inside.

“Iron filings,” he told her.  “Perfectly harmless.  Touch them.  You too, please, madam.”

The older woman looked at him mistrustfully a moment, then leaned in and put a finger into the box.

“Take a small pinch, please, both of you.  Rub it onto your skin.” He watched them obey him like sleepwalkers.  “You’ll agree it does no harm?”

They both nodded, like mechanical toys.  He straightened up. “Good. Now, will I bring Miriam in?  Or would you prefer…”

Mrs Rush looked up at the older woman.  The retainer pursed her lips and left the room.

“It’s Mimi,” Mrs Rush said brokenly.  “No-one ever calls her Miriam.”  

Out in the corridor, Duncan heard a key in a lock, a door opened.  The shrieking began in earnest.  The woman came back, dragging a thrashing, flailing, diminutive rag-clad figure by one thin arm.  It resembled nothing so much as a three or four year old girl with similar features to Mrs Rush herself, and it was clearly terrified of everyone and everything in the room.

“Mama, mama, no, don’t let them,” it wailed.  “Don’t let them burn me!”

Mrs Rush dissolved in tears, buried her face in her hands.

“Mama, please, I’ll be good, I didn’t mean it, please mama, please, I won’t-“

Duncan hissed a word of command in skogurtal, and the creature blinked, then shut up as if its jaw were a sprung trap.  

It was all the evidence he needed.  Nothing human could be compelled in the Forest speech that way.  But, of course, it would not do for the mother, and Duncan felt a tiny prickling sensation in his throat at that tenacity, an unquantified blend of joy and rage and loss that threatened to prick out tears in his eyes. even now  He swallowed hard.  Cleared his throat.

“Let me hold her,” he said, very gently.  

And rapidly, before anyone could react, he stepped across and took the child by both thin wrists from behind, held the skinny arms apart.  The older woman let go, startled.  Duncan lifted the creature forward so it stood right in front of the mother.  He felt how its muscles tensed and writhed, fighting his grip.  He widened his arms, pulled seeming-Mimi into something resembling a crucifixion.  Tears flooded the child’s eyes, flooded down its face.  It moaned and writhed.

But it no longer spoke.

“Mrs Rush,” Duncan, urgently now – this had to be done fast, while her fortitude lasted.  “For your own peace of mind, I would like you to take some of the iron filings and gently rub them on this child’s arm.”

She stared at him, long moments in which he saw the truth finally breach the walls she’d built in her mind, erupt to the conscious level, where it could no longer be denied.  She made a noise, a convulsive sob that wracked her whole body.  But when she met his eyes again, he saw the change, the new determination to go with the knowledge she now would not deny.

She pressed her lips together, tears still welling up, still spilling down her cheeks.

But she did it.

She pinched up the iron filings in her fingers, reached out for the thing that looked like her daughter.  The creature’s muscles cabled against Duncan’s grip.  It kicked out, twisted and thrashed.  Duncan grimaced, tightened his hold and nodded urgently at Irene Rush.

“I’m sorry,” she wept.

But she pressed the iron filings onto one thin arm near the elbow.  

Duncan averted his eyes.

Flash-flare, magnesium bright, blinding in the dimly lit room.  

The mother screamed, but it was lost in the high, ululating howl that broke from the child, and put every hair on Duncan’s body erect.  It was all he could do to maintain his grip, haul back and prevent the creature from kicking Mrs Rush in the face.

A sudden reek of scorching stormed the room, made the two women gag.  

Then acrid smoke, ribboning up off a wound that glowed moss green in the blotched and blunted vision the flare had left them.

Duncan wrestled the thrashing sprite back, away from the mother it had fooled.

“Your daughter is in the Forest,” he said. 

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